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Nokia asks the Internet to help design a phone

Nokia has launched a new project called Design by Community that is seeking …

Nokia is tapping into the collective wisdom of mobile technology enthusiasts on the Internet as it designs a new smartphone concept device. The handset maker has launched a new project called Design by Community which aims to collect feedback about preferred device characteristics from visitors to the Nokia Conversations blog.

The website has a set of sliders that can be used to select a desired phone configuration within certain parameters. When the user has selected their optimal configuration, they can click a "submit" button to send their choices to Nokia. The company will tabulate the results and use the information to design the new device concept. There will be several rounds during which a separate set of parameters will be put up for voting.

The first round focuses on the input mechanisms and device display. Users can select a preferred screen size, specify what kind of screen they want, and indicate their preferences for the keyboard and physical buttons. The voting system imposes some restrictions on the combination of device characteristics that can be chosen. If the user chooses a configuration that is too radical or not sufficiently ambitious, the system won't let them submit it.

The next round of voting, which will open on March 22, will allow participants to select a preferred size and shape for the concept device. Subsequent rounds will focus on materials, connectivity, and camera features. There will also be a round in which users will vote on whether they favor the Linux-based MeeGo platform or the newly opened Symbian operating system.

Nokia says that it received thousands of votes within the first 24 hours of the project. In a blog entry, the company expressed appreciation for the volume of responses and also explained the reasoning behind some of the limitations that are being imposed on the experiment. For example, Nokia says that it intentionally decided to exclude hardware specifications—such as processor performance and memory quantity—from the voting so that the design wouldn't become dated too quickly by advancements in mobile component technologies.

Based on the responses so far, Nokia says that a majority of the voters want a 16:9 capacitive touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard. The most common choices for screen size are 4.5-inch and 4-inch, indicating that users favor a spacious screen but don't want a monolith.

In light of Nokia's growing affinity for the collaborative open source software development model, it's unsurprising that the company is experimenting with crowdsourced product design. Last year, Nokia polled members of its Maemo community to gain feedback on user preferences for keyboard layout. The new Design by Community project is a much more ambitious polling effort.

Although the responses will give Nokia some instructive insights into what design characteristics and capabilities people want from modern smartphones, it's unclear if a community-driven design process can produce meaningfully usable data or serve as the basis for producing a product that is genuinely desirable.

Successful product development arguably transcends the specifics. In practice, delivering a holistically compelling user experience may be more important than conforming with a checklist of expected features. That said, there is still a lot of practical value in understanding consumer expectations. The challenge for Nokia will be respecting the feedback it gets from its users without becoming slavishly committed to implementing the resulting feature checklist.

55 Reader Comments

The handset maker has launched a new project called Design by Community

I first read that as 'Design by Committee'.

So as noble as this gesture might seem, what would their results have looked like if they conducted the polls prior to January 9, 2007? Something tells me all the king's horses and all the king's men would not have come up with an iPhone or anything remotely like it. There IS a method to Steve Jobs' (and Jonathan Ive's) madness.

My vote: A Linux based smart phone which they don't declare obsolete by dropping their OS flavor 5 mins after releasing the actual phone. The N900 would be fine if they were not switching from maemo to meego. Them smart phones live from the variety of apps so make sure devs jump on board and make my phone/OS stay current more than a few months.

Interesting. I will participate in this process and see what results Nokia gets.

For this round, I chose 4.5" screen, capacitive touch, no physical keyboard on a 16:9 ratio. A physical keyboard would be nice, but I'd rather have fewer moving parts and a thinner form factor than the bulk a slide-out keyboard adds.

People don't understand how big a 4" screen actually is and how unpocketable it is for most men. Women can get away with it because of the purse factor. Men can to, but the man bag isn't nearly as popular. The only 4" screen I know of is on the HTC HD and HD2 - theres a reason the industry isn't coming out with them.

And any screen ratio other than 16:9 is not going to work either. Media has moved to 16:9. Monitors have moved to it as well and with it economies of scale. Producing 4:3 or some 21:something ratio will be a failure.

People stare blindly at 16:9, but why? It is not a good aspect ratio for a phone, for browsing it's not wide enough in portrait mode and not enough height in landscape. So what if you have 2 black bars when you occasionally watch a movie?

And if they design and release a handset with the most popular, most requested features and functions, they will promptly be sued half way to oblivion by every other handset maker, with Apple leading the pack. RIM and HTC will also be in that pack, of course, and there will be others, so I'm not just bashing Apple.

Don't expect this to result in anything innovative or useful - that's a sure path to infinite litigation.

@undroid... yah I got burned by that trick on the N810 and the N86 ... I'm just waiting for my HTC Desire to arrive in a week or two so I can happily turn my back on the absolute fail that Nokia has become

This could turn out to be a great new device or not. Whatever happens, I won't ever buy a phone from Nokia again. I'm in the US, and buying an unlocked phone is a hassle. With this being said, I bought a Nokia phone and had it under warranty service with the company three times in one year. The problem was never resolved. The last time I sent it in, I received a correpsondence that they didn't have any phones in stock. They didn't know what the lead time would be for the same model of phone, and they could either send the phone back to me or give me market value of the device. Sending me a new phone with comperable specifications was not an option. So, I took the cash, bought a cheap phone, and try to tell my horrid story about Nokia to anyone that will listen.

"Based on the responses so far, Nokia says that a majority of the voters want a 16:9 capacitive touchscreen and a physical QWERTY keyboard. The most common choices for screen size are 4.5-inch and 4-inch, indicating that users favor a spacious screen but don't want a monolith."

It should be noted that if you voted for the 16:9 and the Qwerty, 4.5 was the largest you could get with the slider/scale system, and only 4 inch or smaller if you selected other options.

Voted 4" capacitive screen @ 16:9, but instantly regretted it in favour of a 4:3 screen ratio. I was thinking about media, and completely forgot about browsing where 4:3 is a better choice for a small screen.

I usually prefer a well executed touchscreen keyboard too, but given that Nokia is going to use Maemo/Meego I voted for a hardware QWERTY since I can have a UNIX shell to go with it.

Nice to see Nokia's crowdsourcing efforts. I've never owned one of their phones myself, but I could see myself picking up their N900 followup if they get a larger capacitive screen on its successor.

This is going to be a disaster. To quote Jobs himself, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” This is going to be a product that's just a feature checklist, but that's not what makes for successful ones. The iPod, iPhone, DS, Wii, and plenty of others are all examples of hugely successful products that universally got creamed on the feature lists. There's a reason for that. The people writing the lists aren't a dominant consumer force, and the stuff that consumers care about can't be found on a checklist.

People stare blindly at 16:9, but why? It is not a good aspect ratio for a phone, for browsing it's not wide enough in portrait mode and not enough height in landscape. So what if you have 2 black bars when you occasionally watch a movie?

I wish I had read this comment before I voted. It is a really good point - I have watched maybe a couple of bits of 16:9 media (tv/movies) since I got my iPhone, but unless I have a book with me, I spend most of my 4-5 hour rt commute surfing the net. A 4:3 screen would make that effort a little more pleasant.

What's the difference (for a user) between resistive and capacitive touch? From wikipedia it sounds like a tradeoff of resolution versus multi-touch capability.

And what's hotkey + onetouch? Is that like the iPhone's "one big stupid button" design? I want more buttons, especially if I want to play games (open games, not from some obnoxious online store).

Personally I care more about resolution than screen size. I'd take a really sharp 3" screen over a bulky, low-pixel-count 4.5" any day. Plus a bigger screen takes more battery power to operate. Too bad the poll doesn't account for battery life.

I'm on a "dumb" phone with 2.25" (diag) non-touch screen and standard (0-9,*,#) buttons right now though, so I'm coming at this from an angle of not yet finding any device satisfactory enough to upgrade...

I hope I'm not just being cynical but this looks 99% marketing and 1% actual design by community.

iPhones are 3.5" and 1.5:1 (13.5:9). Personally I wouldn't want a wider phone but could manage a slightly taller phone which is why I voted 4" 16:9. I guessing that'll end up about the same width as an iPhone but taller. I don't know that it would actually be more usable as I prefer typing wide screen and the problem with that is the remaining display is so small....

If Nokia really wanted to make me happy they'd build a phone with a physical keyboard and a halographic display.... I'd settle for a fold out physical display until the tech cataches up with my dreams.... Actually after 2 years with iPhones I don't really care about a physical keyboard any more, but it sounded cool that way....

People don't understand how big a 4" screen actually is and how unpocketable it is for most men. Women can get away with it because of the purse factor. Men can to, but the man bag isn't nearly as popular. The only 4" screen I know of is on the HTC HD and HD2 - theres a reason the industry isn't coming out with them.

HD2 is amazing and barely bigger then an iPhone thanks to less bezel and better body design. Can't wait to pick up a Supersonic on Sprint with similar dimensions but with Android and Wimax instead of WM6.x and 3G.

It's honestly the only way I can see myself giving up a QWERTY. Typing on my iPod Touch is terrible compared to even the tiny keyboard on my Pre. If the masses want thin at all costs then it will have to be big enough to support a decent virtual keyboard.

So you don't like the N900 because of what, the 5:3 screen and Maemo 5?

Personally I'd love it if the Pandora (down the road) included phone capability. That's also a 5:3 screen. It'll run modified Ångström Linux. TBH I don't really know the differences between these mobile OSes, but from what I've read this one is pretty flexible.

You guys have already got Blackberry, Droid, Eris, and within the next month or two, the Incredible and Nexus One, not to mention the Touch Pro 2 and other WM phones that will start phasing out soon in favor of upcoming WP7 phones.

It's kind of sad how they only give you so many options to play with. I'd love to impress on them my favorite pet idea... namely, a "gamer phone" with a 3D accelerator (probably a PowerVR or the like) and a slide-out game controller in place of a slide-out keyboard. Maemo would be an ideal OS for such a beast, too.

Then again, this is the company that brought us the N-Gage... chances are, they'd find some way to fuck it up.

Hm, I've clearly been out-of-touch with phones. I looked up a few newer models (Motorola Droid, HTC Hero, Nexus One) and they seem nifty. Still not the phone+game console+MP3 player (64+ GB) combo that I'd want though.

I think this is generally a good idea, but it's difficult to tell how the final product would actually turn out. There's a huge difference between choosing the specs you want from a website and actually holding and using a phone in your hands. What sounds good online won't necessarily translate into a great, usable phone.

That said, I'd like something around the 16:10 ratio... not quite as thin as the 16:9, on whatever size screen a device not much larger than the iPhone could support (greatly dependent on bezel sizes). I'd prefer a physical keyboard, but not if it adds too much bulk (which is hard to say until you actually hold the device). I'd rather have a smaller but clearer/higher resolution screen than a larger and lower resolution one.

It's these kinds of experiences you just won't be able to define online.

This is going to be a disaster. To quote Jobs himself, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” This is going to be a product that's just a feature checklist, but that's not what makes for successful ones. The iPod, iPhone, DS, Wii, and plenty of others are all examples of hugely successful products that universally got creamed on the feature lists. There's a reason for that. The people writing the lists aren't a dominant consumer force, and the stuff that consumers care about can't be found on a checklist.

Plus, it's hard for many to visualize a checklist.

Eventually, this will be a phone designed by power users for power users, in a interesting PR stunt.

Am I the only person who likes resistive screens? I like the extra resolution so I can precisely tap stuff with a fingernail. For the bigger UI buttons, I can just mash with my whole finger the same as capacitive. Plus you can use it with a stylus or with gloves which come in handy for different scenarios.

Capacitive only gives you multitouch, which is good for.... what? Gimmicky pinch zoom stuff and a slightly more responsive keyboard? Not worth it, IMO. Double tap to zoom, Fennec-style, is quick, fool proof, and does exactly what I need.

People don't understand how big a 4" screen actually is and how unpocketable it is for most men. Women can get away with it because of the purse factor. Men can to, but the man bag isn't nearly as popular. The only 4" screen I know of is on the HTC HD and HD2 - theres a reason the industry isn't coming out with them.

And any screen ratio other than 16:9 is not going to work either. Media has moved to 16:9. Monitors have moved to it as well and with it economies of scale. Producing 4:3 or some 21:something ratio will be a failure.

The nexus one is 3.7". If they make the screen more flush to the edges they can probably do a 4" screen without increasing the physical size of the phone.

The "usablity / Jakob Nielsen" school of thought ... ignore what users say, and focus on what they do.

Example would be MMORPG's ... when dev's start listening to their fan base and implementing changes, it just causes a world of mediocrity. You can't please everyone. So instead make a few products custom-made for certain markets.